O direito à educação em questão: as tensões e disputas no interior do Programa Mais Educação

Abstract

Beginning with the notion of a political project as a set of beliefs, values and representations of social life, this thesis aims to reveal the conflicts that express the disputes around the Mais Educação Program of the Brazilian Ministry of Education. To do so, it considers as reference that disputes take form through the action of social subjects with interests, values and world conceptions. In this sense, it seeks to perceive the plurality and polysemy of meanings attributed to the countrys ongoing right to education, in order to reveal what mobilizes the public educational scenario and what projects are in dispute. Considering the right to education as the background to this thesis, I try to unravel the thousand-year-old forms in which inequalities have been built up and how the universal promises of education as a right for all collide with the brutal realities of children and adolescents that go to school. To understand the paradigms that compose the grammar of rights, I take as theoretical references authors from the field of post or decolonialism as Quijano, Lander, Grosfoguel and Sousa Santos. As contribution to the analysis within the educational field, authors who dialogue with the decolonial theories are brought forth, such as Arroyo and Walsh. The analysis takes into account the actions of different social actors, in the field of social movements and in the business field, in the disputes and conflicts surrounding the Program. As a methodological contribution, qualitative documentary research was chosen, through highly diversified sources: institutional websites and videos, newspapers and magazines, books, periodicals and institutional publications. It was evidenced that the Mais Educação Program was formulated by a set of social actors of different theoretical matrices and visions of education. It was the Ministrys commitment to the possibility of a collective construction of this program, with its main pilar - full-time integral education - as a demand of the entire society. The Mais Educação Program carries conflicting consensuses in its formulation and implementation. Tensions arise as the program begins to consider subjects as silenced and subalternized beings, bringing them to the center of the Program. With the new "Novo Mais Educação", instituted by the Michel Temer government, the Program ceases to be a policy that promotes integral education in the country and becomes a strategy to improve the learning of Portuguese and Mathematics. This shift in focus implies the denial that subjects bear culture, values and identities. It does not dialogue with local knowledge, territory, the communities and social movements; that is, there is no dialogue with the diverse Other. It is a conservative restructuring in an ideological terrain supported by a semantic field with a meritocratic, market efficiency and hierarchical logic, to the detriment of subjects protagonism and of a logic that has recognized democratic rights and spaces.